The ACM Conferences Hypertext 2000 and Digital Libraries 2000 were hosted in San Antonio, TX, from May the 29th to June the 7th. This year KMi was represented by Simon Buckingham Shum (lecturer) and Clara Mancini (Ph.D. research student), respectively presenting at Digital Library and Hypertext.
At HT, themes particularly relevant to KMi included automatic generation of hypertext functions and reusability, ontology and metadata supported hypertext, hypertext fiction and argumentation rhetoric. Generally (and especially in the workshop Hypertext Writers) a consensus seemed to emerge that literary theory hasn’t answered basic questions about hypertext which still remain open, that hypertext and hypertextuality are still confused concepts, and that understanding of the relation between the technical characteristics and the aesthetics of the medium must be deepened. Clara’s work on cinematic rhetorical models and hypertext argumentation narrative seems to have been appreciated as it is grounded on a reflection on the semiotic features of the two media in order to provide insights into hypertext aesthetic and rhetoric.
Themes like browsing, extraction and visualisation of multimedia knowledge structures, usability and accessibility of information have characterised most of the presentations at DL. ScholOnto (Simon’s ontology-based system to represent scholarly claims) was very well received in the workshops Networked Knowledge Organization Systems and Structural Computing 2: people appreciated the idea of an ontology modelling scholars’ perspective on a domain instead of the domain itself, which apparently still represents an original and forefront approach in the problem of scholarly discourse modelling and digital library construction.
HT Conference: http://ht00.org DL Conference: http://dl00.org Scholonto Project: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/scholonto Cinematic Rhetoric and Hypertext: http://http://kmi.open.ac.uk/techreports/index.html
_
Clara Mancini Knowledge Media Institute The Open University Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA Tel: +44 1908 655945 Fax: +44 1908 653169 http://kmi.open.ac.uk
